Alan Turing's Automatic Computing Engine: The Master Codebreaker's Struggle to build the Modern Computer

The mathematical genius Alan Turing (1912-1954) was one of the greatest scientists and thinkers of the 20th century. Now well known for his crucial wartime role in breaking the ENIGMA code, he was the first to conceive of the fundamental principle of the modern computer-the idea of controlling a computing machine's operations by means of a program of coded instructions, stored in the machine's 'memory'. In 1945 Turing drew up his revolutionary design for an electronic computingmachine-his Automatic Computing Engine ('ACE'). A pilot model of the ACE ran its first program in 1950 and the product